Struggles and Strategies of an artistic search for Aesthetics of Class and Poverty beyond representation

Using examples from her artistic research and the publication Voice Works / Voice Strikes, Kerstin Honeit will present the (film) voice in its role as worker. The lecture will explore the work the voice does between the moving images, how the voice in mainstream cinema additionally cements a white bourgeois supremacy acoustically and how working class voices are silenced on film soundtracks.
Rather than focusing on the production of standardisation, this lecture looks at producing non-unambiguity. This is a process that is also inherent in the mediated and disembodied voice; as in lip-synching on queer stages in the encounter with bodies. Here the voice works to resist shallow visual representation and thereby against the white bourgeois desire to secure its power through the permanent and violent reproduction of taxonomies. In this context, Kerstin Honeit will talk about the difference between ‘voice drag’ and ‘voice passing’, about activist-artistic practices and survival strategies. Kerstin Honeit’s latest work will examine the causes of structural poverty and the consequent exclusion from the (German) artistic and cultural industry. With this in mind, the artist is trying out aesthetic strategies in the representation of economic poverty and social exclusion which refuse to accept the taxonomic logic of representation. The lecture will conclude with an invitation to a discussion that, in addition to examining artistic and activist possibilities, will look at (infra-)structural preconditions for breaking the huge classism in the art and culture industries.

Kerstin Honeit is an artist working with experimental documentary moving image formats. She lives in Berlin, where she studied visual arts and stage design at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule. In her film works she researches the mechanisms of representation in the production of hegemonic image worlds, in connection with cultural as well as linguistic modes of translation, especially in the cinematographic context. The focus here is on the politics of the (film) voice and especially on how voice as a queer event within moving images can unsettle the gaze regimes of dominant culture. Against the background of Honeit’s artistic practice, the publication Kerstin Honeit. Voice Works / Voice Strikes (ed. McGovern) has just been published by b_books. Honeit has taught at various art academies and is currently sharing the professorship for spatial concepts at the HBK Braunschweig with Candice Breitz. Her work is regularly presented at film festivals and in exhibitions internationally.

The lecture series is jointly curated and organised by Prof. Dr. Sandra Noeth (MA SODA/HZT Berlin) and Prof. Dan Belasco Rogers (UdK Studium Generale).